- [Mark] On the south corner coast of Hawaii island,
there is one of the last Hawaiian fishing villages
in the world, and it's Ho'Okena.
(water splashing)
They still practice traditional fishing in the old style,
in a canoe chumming the water the way
that generations of Hawaiians have done.
It is something that needs to be experienced firsthand.
If we don't continue to learn these things,
that knowledge will be lost.
(upbeat music)
My name's Mark Noguchi.
My friends call me Gooch, and I'm a chef here in Hawaii.
My belief is in preserving the techniques
and the ingredients that we have
in this place that I call home.
When we talk about Hawaiian food,
there's before Western contact,
and then there's post Western contact.
One of the biggest misconceptions about Hawaiian food
is how it's always presented in this gigantic,
you know, luau with the emu and the kalua pig,
and then the fire knife dancers,
which, that's not even Hawaiian!
Hawaiians, they eat simply.
It was largely a very ocean, or Palauea,
and vegetal based diet.
The reason why I'm going down to Ho'Okena today
is to spend the day with one of the Hawaiian families
who have graciously called their friends and family
to come down and share their practice.
(upbeat music)
- [Charles] Hawaiian practices around fishing and planting
and growing is all about sustainability.
We fish with nets, and catch what we need.
Opelu is a mackerel; and it's the mainstay
of the fishing village here.
If you were to try and go in the water
and catch them with a spear or something else,
they're gonna just leave.
They're not gonna stay around, you need to feed them.
You would prepare their bait, which was 100% vegetable.
We call that the pololu.
That's put into a bag and the bag is thrown into the ocean,
and when it's yanked, all the pololu-or the bait-is let go.
The fish aggregate and come around and feed.
We don't separate ourselves from the land.
We don't separate ourselves from what feeds us.
So, it's important then to sustain those aggregation areas,
and they did that by feeding the fish
during the off season without even catching them.
And this was a means to train the fish
to come back to the same area all the time.
It's almost like ocean farming.
(upbeat music)
- [Mark] So, after you harvest all of this fish,
you gotta clean it; and you see aunties,
and you see husbands; and you see friends come around.
Everybody knows that there's a job to do.
Today, we're gonna prepare opelu
in as many ways as possible.
Fried, seasoned just with pa'akai,
keeping it super simple.
We're also gonna have opelu raw,
which is just cut up, and it's just lightly seasoned.
Opelu lomi, where you take it and you lomi it,
and you turn it, and you mix it with other ingredients.
Onions, tomatoes, green onions,
seasoned with like just chili pepper and salt.
We also have poi today-fresh poi.
Poi is taro that's been cooked,
and it's been mixed with water,
and it is one of our staple starches.
We also have ulu, which is breadfruit.
Breadfruit is another traditional Hawaiian staple as well.
And this is how we eat, everyday, simple.
(speaking foreign language)
One thing that we always do: we bless the food,
that it's a non-denominational mahalo,
to all the hands and all the spirits
and all the people that have come together
to put all this food together.
Mahalo.
(crowd clapping)
And then you eat.
You just sit around and hang out.
That's when the stories come out;
that's everything that we worked for for that day.
It reinforces, for myself, the importance
of being able to know the difference
of what it is that we're cooking and serving.
So good.
In today's day and age,
where we are all worried about our resources,
there are people still doing their part
to preserve an eco system.
It lends hope for us to continue
to preserve the place that we call home.
We need to take these lessons that aren't shared worldwide;
we need to be able to take these lessons
and apply them to our daily life.
(light upbeat music)